A blog for the New Zealand creative advertising industry, now at www.campaignbrief.com/nz. Email news to: michael@campaignbrief.com

Thursday, April 06, 2006

From those wonderful people who brought you link-testing...

In 1993, some American researchers did some...research. They asked 1001 Americans what their views were of "good art". A bit like what market researchers here do with ads and the like. Recruit people in a caravan at a shopping mall - you know how it works. Anyway, based on this insightful information, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid created the perfect painting.

It's a painterly landscape featuring George Washington, a strolling family, deer and a bellowing hippo. And yeah, it's as nasty as it sounds. You don't want to see it.

Luke Sullivan likes hippos, if his taste in type is anything to go by - every Gellin McFaggot Minneapolis ad from the '80s had big, pachydermous helvetica bold condensed type that would make hippos look emaciated - and thus kinda sexy...Try and out-geek that.